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PARK RANGERS FOR FIRE PREVENTION,
NATURE EDUCATION AND LOCAL COMMUNITIES

Parkrangers spend most of their time in the field, helping
people, educating children and making sure that both people and animals are
safe. They are friendly, helpful people, who always try to make you feel welcome
in a national park or nature reserve. Modern parkrangers have a wide variety of tasks in protected
areas, and without parkrangers, nature has little chance to remain in good
condition. Parkrangers are the real conservation workers!Let's look at what keeps a
park ranger busy.

Parkrangers for nature education and assistance to
visitors

Parkrangers help visitors to find their
way in the national park, they give great talks on nature and they educate
thousands of school children. They help visitors with information on making their visit
an enjoyable and enriching experience. They hold campfire talks, they help in visitor centers,
they organize excursions and they answer questions from visitors. Without park
rangers, visitors get much less enjoyment from their visit to a national
park.

Parkrangers for prevention and combat of forest fires

One of the effects of climate change is that many regions with warm
climates or summers are becoming dryer and hotter. This has resulted in a tremendous
increase in forest fires in nature reserves in many parts of the world. During
the driest months of the dry season, the skies of Honduras and Nicaragua are
completely covered with smoke. Without parkrangers to extinguish those fires in time, enormous areas lose their forests and
many wild animals that live in them. Over the last decade, Australia has
been battling with the largest bush fires in its history.

Parkrangers are crucial for combating fire. Not
only by extinguishing wild fires when they occur, but also by setting fire to
the vegetation when it still is moist at the end of the rainy season: so called
"prescribed burning". Fires in
moist forests burn much less hot and do much less damage. The trees survive, but
the lose vegetation that is drying up, disappears and when the area has dries up
during the dry season, there is far less risk that such area starts burning
later during the hot season.

Also, parkrangers give talks in the local communities on how to prevent forest
fires. You can imagine that such programs are extremely important for keeping
nature in protected areas in good shape.

Parkrangers for local communities

Local communities around and in
nature reserves are almost always poor. In fact, the communities around
protected areas, usually are among the poorest in the country. This is because
protected areas are usually in remote regions where the development and
infrastructure still has not come. When you are poor, you try to do everything
to feed your family and to earn some money. Having a protected areas nearby is a
temptation for many local communities, particularly if they don't receive any
benefits.

Parkrangers spend much of their time working with local communities
helping them to get benefits from the protected areas. They help communities
to make and sell souvenirs that can be sold to visitors to the national
park. They give talks on nature during community meetings and at schools and
they organize environmental education classes and excursions to the reserve for school children. Through such
educational programmes, the parkrangers help local communities get benefits from the park and they
turn local communities into friends of the reserve in stead of threats to
nature.

Park
rangers enforce the law

Of course there will always be some people
who don't respect the law and go out poaching animals and cutting down the
forest. It has been shown that in any nature reserve with sufficient parkrangers,
that poaching and illegal cutting of trees decreases enormously, even if they
spend most of their time doing many tasks that have nothing to do with
patrolling. In fact, in Latin America, rangers hardly ever have to give a fine and most of the
time they don't carry a weapon.

Of course, in some protected areas,
particularly in Africa, poaching is a very important
problem, and when needed, parkrangers go out in patrolling raids in defense of
animals. In some countries rangers have to fight real battles against poacher
gangs armed with automatic rifles. Besides being helpful, parkrangers are very brave
people when necessary. During the last 5 decades of conservation history, many
have lost their lives battling organized poaching, particularly in Africa.

Park
rangers are the eyes and ears of the national park services

As they work in many places in and
around the national parks, the parkrangers see and hear what goes on in their area.
In fact, they become the eyes and ears for the directors of nature
reserves, as they get to talk to everybody and are continuously observing what
goes on. An important task of a parkranger is to make notes of what goes on
and to write down their observations of rare animals: they monitor wildlife.
Monitoring of rare animals becomes very expensive if you have to have it done by
biologists. Rangers, who are in the park anyway, can monitor animals at almost
no extra costs to the park.

Park
rangers are multipurpose officers

So if you ask an experienced national
parks director what for him or her is the most important officer of the
national park, he or she will always tell you that it is the parkranger! Rangers are
the real conservation workers. They
are "jacks of all trades", and by working with local communities and
visitors,

Parkrangers make the parks safe and pleasant to
be in;

Parkrangers help local
communities to combat their poverty;

Parkrangers educate children and;

Parkrangers protect nature and
wild animals.

Adopt
A Ranger provides development cooperation and nature
conservation combined

When you donate to Adopt A Ranger,
you not only finance conservation of nature, you also finance help to some of
the poorest communities in the world and you help educate poor children.
By donating to Adopt A Ranger, you finance HOPE,

HOPE for nature,

HOPE for wild animals, and

HOPE and progress for local communities.

The Adopt A Ranger
website is part of an integrated net of nature conservation
information websites. The following table lists the latest news on
those combined websites:

With continuously changing exchange rates between Euros and US
Dollars, there are some difference between the mentioned values in Ç
and $. We apologize that we can't continuously change the values and
use nearby equivalents in rounded off figures.

Contact us by email if you are concerned
about the legitimacy of a fundraiser or the appropriateness of the
fundraising methods applied.

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Adopt A Ranger Inc.
is incorporated in West Virginia, USA, registered under control
number 90701 enjoying exemption of Federal income tax under section
501 (c) (3) and in the Netherlands Stichting Adopt A Ranger under
S200823. Disclaimer